How Tydy CEO Kiran Menon grew Tydy to $2.7M revenue and 17 customers in 2023.

Heidi was launched back in 2017 they sold 17.5 percent of the company and raised 400k to get going now they've hit 1.5 million bucks in ARR up from 600 Grand an hour just a year ago having raised under a million bucks they raised another 600k last year at 3.2 posts so they've been I'd say very Capital efficient team at 27 they're trying to help you onboard your new employees faster they're doing some Enterprise space big companies onboarding one to two thousand new employees per month and that's how they price face fee 80 000 bucks per year then utility-based fee on top of that based off the volume of new onboards you're completing each month hey folks my guest today is Kieran Menon he's the co-founder and CEO of Tidy tydy the employee data and onboarding platform he started tidy after 17 years of sales and Consulting experience and previously ran sales for Opera software the browser and advertising company Karen you ready to take us to the top I am Nation let's do this all right so what did Opera do like a terrible job onboarding you and you said I'm gonna leave and launch my onboarding company actually no I mean I always uh kind of admire the culture at Oprah and so um kind of looked at a lot of the other companies I'd worked at before and said you know there was a lot of lacking in those processes and so yeah that's when the journey started it's amazing so what year was that when'd you launch uh we we actually started dating it about in about 2017. okay 2017 and who's we are you a single co-founder or multiple in the team or what no we're three co-founders three of us have known each other since when we were in school um kind of went our separate ways and then you know got back together to start dieting and since you're all friends you just split Equity evenly 33 each pretty much yeah it's amazing all right before we get too deep into that the back story here tell us give us an example of a customer using taihi today and how they use you yeah sure so um we work with large Enterprises you know companies with uh two thousand to five thousand plus employees and uh what we fundamentally do is we work with a company like genpag or Unilever or ABN Dev and we kind of bring together the HR data and ID systems so that people teams now have a single place to go to to kind of orchestrate their processes on board people passed the smarter and also retain them longer so fundamentally you know the the problem statement that we went after is multiple apps complexity across various processes you have HR ID admin Ops uh bring all of that together and just create one single place to kind of manage it very interesting and so for this technology for your technology what are customers paying on average per month or per year um so it's traditionally a yearly contract and we usually do three-year contracts with Enterprise that's one good thing working with Enterprise you know it's it's long term and uh today we do on average uh our eighth TV is above eighty thousand dollars and if I'm paying you 80 000 bucks a year how many employees am I likely managing with tidy um so the average company is doing between about two thousand to five thousand people every month and and sorry what does that mean two thousand five thousand interviews per month no on boarding so people being added onto the system okay so that's how you charge it's number of people you onboard per month yeah yeah interesting so how do you know to charge in year three you how you make them project how many they think they're going to be onboarding three years from now and they pay for that or sign up today yeah so we kind of do a split between our pricing one is in a platform subscription but yeah which is based on the total number of uh employees in the organization and then the Top-Up which is a per user fee on top of that which is for every new user that's added so you know a company with a hundred thousand employees would already have about 50 000 of them on Tidy by the end of uh Year One oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview okay so if I'm paying you a base fee of 80k just to sign up how many employees do I likely already have uh probably about 40 to 50 000. wow okay got it so 50k base and then I'm saying Hey listen Kieran I'm gonna onboard two to five thousand per month for the next two or three years and you're saying okay the extra fee for that is why right exactly it's a couple of dollars on double that I see interesting okay so base fee is about 50k employees if I'm paying you 80 000 bucks a year or something like that um cool all right and then I guess give me more of the more the backstory here so you launched 2017 with three co-founders how did you guys get your first customer it was actually um you know given the um kind of time we'd spent in the market we kind of had a lot of networks that we reached out to and uh went out and kind of spoke to a lot of people so it's not that we woke up one day and came up with this uh solution um we actually did go out and talk to a lot of Executives and then we realized you know the the whole workplace deck was kind of exploding um but when you kind of looked at right at the beginning the onboarding piece uh there was a huge vacuum in 2017 2018 but it was still nice to have it wasn't you know a need um and so very candidly our our growth has happened in the last two years since the pandemic uh for the first two or three years we were kind of building the product with a couple of POC customers like Unilever and Fidelity Investments um and then in the last couple of years it has pretty much taken off for us uh fundamentally just be clear so you were pre you had like no SAS Revenue back in 20 between 2017 and 2020. you were just doing PLS yeah okay so no SAS Revenue pocs only uh we were doing probably about a hundred thousand dollars oh you did have SAS Revenue yeah we did oh okay so I guess what year did you have your first dollar of SAS Revenue 2019 2018 and 2019 beginning yeah ah okay so so got it so how did you start there's a lot of people listening right now launching companies going I want to get a POC with Unilever and then you know make them pay 50 000 bucks for that and then convert them to a ten thousand dollar a month plan right how did you do that what was the POC app not with them specifically but on average recharging for pocs and how did you move someone from a POC to a paid plan yeah we were we we kind of um made one thing very clear is that we'll kind of co-design the solution but we're not doing it for free so if we want to do a POC it's still going to be a paid for POC um and I think you know my my 17 years...